They were young, long-limbed girls with backcombed hair and ready, bright smiles. Un-self-conscious on the beach in pre-Lycra baggy bikinis, they dated boys who called their mothers ma'am and always picked up the tab. In the late 50s and early 60s, the sensuality of the all-American swingin' girl preoccupied a nation still reluctant to part with the long-held belief in whores or angels. For a sulky-lipped young rock'n'roll star it was a notion that was so inbred that it crudely dominated his romantic encounters for life.

With his jet-black hair and sharp blue eyes, Elvis Presley may have been as beautiful as the starlets and beauty queens he dated, but at heart he was a God-fearing Mississippi boy.

'I'd never break a virgin - there's enough prostitutes around,' he was fond of telling the Memphis Mafia in later years. It was a rule he stuck to, at least in his early days. 'One of the questions I'm always asked is, "Did you sleep with Elvis?",' says June Juanico, the woman the star nearly married in 1956. 'I tell 'em no.' Juanico talks of the couple making love in 'their own special way', of Elvis saying he wanted the first time to be special and of their agreement to wait until they were married. 'There were a lot of virgins about in those days.'

June was Elvis's first serious love affair but the touching sentimentality of their two-year relationship would perhaps be less poignant had Elvis not gone on to become a famous and later tragic figure.

'Elvis was a very sensitive person, very tender, but on the outside he was very macho,' she says. An outspoken and feisty teenager, June recalls a time when she stood up to Elvis in front of his band of hangers-on, who even then were beginning to accompany him everywhere. He grabbed her arm, took her into the bathroom and declared: 'Look, you are so right, I am really sorry.' He kept her there for five minutes, then swaggered out, his image intact.

June worked hard to keep Elvis grounded, but as his fame and his touring increased, the relationship fizzled out, with phone calls becoming less and less frequent. 'Two weeks went by, then another week. Surely he would call for my birthday, I thought. But he didn't.'

Elvis was now in the big time and serial-dating, but the main woman in his life was still his mother. Gladys Presley had kept a close watch on her son's morality, greeting June with kindness and eagerness as she waited for a daughter-in-law. But in 1958, she died. It was a bad year for Elvis to lose stability; he had just been enlisted.

'Here was a private person, very shy, a kid who had never as much as slept over at a friend's house. In the army he was forced into interaction with strangers. This is where Elvis developed the gruff, macho and boastful nature as a mode of survival,' says his biographer, Peter Guralnick. 'He'd always been the chief and now he had to be a scout.'

It was while he was doing military service in Germany that he met the 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu. This was also where he discovered prostitutes and picked up the intense fear of sexually transmitted diseases which led to claims that he had a morbid fear of sexual penetration.

When he brought Priscilla back to the States to live at Graceland, ostensibly under the chaperoning protection of his father Vernon and his new wife Dee, Elvis also brought back a taste for womanising. From now on, the restraints were off. The partying that had, in 1957, drawn thinly-veiled accusations of homosexuality - a scandal mag ran an article with the headline 'Presley's Powder-Puff Pals', showing a picture of Elvis and Liberace with the caption 'Two prominent bachelors' - was now progressing into fully-blown orgies.

His fast-track into the trite stream of movie musicals fed his appetite for sex. This was a time when Hollywood stalked beauty pageants and modelling competitions to supply the starlet machine. Julie Parrish was 25 when she first met Elvis on the set of Paradise Hawaiian Style , a film notable for one of the most cringing moments in any Presley movie. 'He had to sing to a dog,' says Parrish. 'The song was called, "It's a Dog's Life". It was so embarrassing for him and we just couldn't stop laughing. He hated it with a passion.'

Parrish was 25, a naive but driven young woman who had arrived in Hollywood via a magazine competition and, long a fan of Elvis, had fought to get the role. 'I was really scared, so nervous when I met him. The first scene we did together was an embrace and he was very quiet at first. He was not an educated man and he was quite guarded when he met people. But looking into his eyes just took your breath away. There was an energy there that almost knocked you to the ground. Was it sexual? You're damned right it was.

'But, oh my God, what a kisser. You know, I tell people I'm going to die happy because I got to kiss Elvis Presley. He had very soft lips, the softest lips I've ever kissed. Oh, he was the most beautiful man.'

Like many of 'Elvis's angels', she is coy about their off-screen relationship. 'Well, he was with Priscilla at the time,' she says. 'We were naive about sex and we were naive about drugs. We were all taking pills - if you were tired you'd take a pill, if you wanted to go to sleep you'd take a pill. One time on set I had a real pain in my side - a side-effect, I think - and Elvis scooped me up, carried me into his trailer and shut the door. Outside the crew was waiting and wondering, but Elvis was oblivious to the innuendo. He placed his hand over my side and tried to do some healing on me.'

These movies were often lifted by the on-screen chemistry between Elvis and his co-stars, which was usually mirrored in real-life affairs. Natalie Wood, Connie Stevens, Ann-Margret, Juliet Prowse, Debra Paget, Anne Helm were all on his arm at one point, while Priscilla was waiting at home. Not that their relationship was entirely chaste in pre-wedding days. Elvis spent hundreds of dollars on Polaroid film, snapping Priscilla and her girlfriends cavorting around Graceland in their pants and training bras.

Elvis also adored to fondle and suck women's toes, and those in his entourage who were given the job of choosing companions for him would often be asked to check the girls' feet. Small and delicate was the Presley ideal and at least two girlfriends reported having been given the nickname 'Bitty' by Elvis in honour of their 'itty-bitty' feet.

The actress Cybill Shepherd was Miss Teenage Memphis when she met Elvis in 1972 - a year after a sexually frustrated and increasingly marginalised Priscilla had walked out on him. But Shepherd's much-quoted claims that she taught him the joys of oral sex is viewed with scepticism by other lovers of the King.

'I laughed when I read that,' says one, who prefers to remain anonymous. 'I can just hear Elvis saying, "Oh,yeah, honey, I've never done anything like that before. You want to show me that one more time?". She's a real nice lady but I don't know that Elvis had much left to learn by then. By that time it was just a shuttle - one came in the door as another was flown back to Vegas.'

Six months after Priscilla left, Elvis dated Linda Thompson. A beautiful university student, she was a virgin when they met, but what started with marathon love-making sessions in Vegas hotel rooms disintegrated into a sexless and gloomy existence.

Of all the women who lived with Elvis, few have been as frank as Thompson: 'There were times when he was very, very, difficult. There was a lot of heartache and he exhibited a lot of self-destruc tive behaviour, which was very difficult for me, you know, watching someone I loved so much destroy himself.' Thompson saved Elvis from death on several occasions and would often lie on the bed with her hand near his mouth to feel his breath as he slept.

'It took a lot for Linda to finally leave him. She loved him very much, but the man she'd fallen for was gone and she needed to save herself. I know it cut her up real bad but she wanted marriage and children and that was never going to happen,' says a friend. By the time she left him in 1976, a year before his death, the beautiful bejeaned country boy was unrecognisable.

Some doubt he ever had sex again, and his final live-in girlfriend, who became his third and last fiancée, is too polite to say. Ginger Alden, another beauty queen, was barely in her twenties when she discovered the lifeless body of Elvis Presley facedown in a Graceland bathroom. Like Thompson before her, she gave up everything to become a 24-hour nurse, hand-holder, even lullaby-singer, to a reclusive, drug-dependent and deeply insecure man. She was also a witness to his last will and testament. He left her nothing.

June Juanico is now in her early sixties, working at a casino restaurant in her home town of Biloxi, Mississippi. She says she cried when Elvis died - 'but only for a year'. Julie Parrish is still a sometime actress in California where she retains friendships with some of her fellow starlets, such as Anne Helm, and has mourned the death of others like Debra Paget. 'But I still talk to Elvis now and again,' she says, wistfully.